Blind, Glowing, Spinning

by Matthew Fitch
illustration by Julie Sloan

We sit across from each other at my little table.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks me.

We make love on the sofa.

Afterwards, when I get up to use the bathroom, it’s too much for her. I hear the front door slam as I am finishing up.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell myself, looking into the mirror for a long time. I feel self-conscious. Finally, I go back out and put my shorts on.

I light a cigarette.

I get the bottle.

She lives five minutes away. I call her house, letting the other end ring six times like a normal person would.

I say out loud, “Baby, where are you?” But I’m more amused than anything.

It’s then that I notice the ants. It’s a basement apartment, and the concrete floor slab gives onto dirt underneath.

They aren’t normal ants. These ones have wings.

I ignore them at first. There are only a few.

I keep drinking. I am so amused. I wonder things like, how do they get the shells off of cocktail nuts?

Actually, I have a cocktail nut can which I am using as an ashtray.

I feel good. I take a filthy, burning swig, and turn on the stereo.

I met her at a party in Coventry. It was instant mutual attraction. I remember her filling her glass from the keg in porch-light, following our introduction. She raised her eyes to me and smiled. How much I liked that.

We removed to a spot near the woods, at the edge of the lawn. Her name was Monica, she was taking summer classes in English.

“It’s so boring up here in the summer,” she said.

It was a clear night, and we regarded the heavens for a while, talked, drank a few more from the tepid keg. Then we left for her place.

I was messy. I was drunk. I was nervous. I loved it. So much so that she got me to blab about my life and my past afterwards. It was funny. She listened to everything, and I could tell she had a place in mind for all of it. There was a disturbing side to this, too. One time that night she started going down on me and told me to keep talking.

She was twenty and I was twenty-one. She decided immediately that I was her lost boy. She was going to hold me and kiss me until – well, until I stopped living my life.

It sounded alright to me at the time. At the back of my mind, something began to coalesce, heat up, and spin. This hot, spinning thing glowed brighter and spun faster at her every gesture towards me.

But the minute she left, it always left with her.

I sigh. I am completely relaxed.

Led Zeppelin boils around me.

Where the hell are all these ants coming from?

I investigate, and discover they are emerging from a seam where the wall meets the floor.

I pick up a fallen one and examine it. It’s an ant, alright. I can see it. Its little legs tickle my palm. There is a break in song and I can hear it: The tiny wings, erect, rustle against each other as the ant scrabbles for whatever foot-hold it is searching for on my hand.

An ant with wings. Well now. I’ve seen termites with wings, in National Geographic. The termites live underground, just like ants. They have a queen that looks like a mutant loaf of bread. Once a year all the winged ones come out to mate, and are fodder for all the termite-eating animals in the area. They have to mate or else they die. The ones that do mate, the males, die anyway. I figure the same thing must be happening for my ants.

One of them flops hopelessly on the floor. I pour a little bit of whiskey over it.
I feel bad, though.

There is a fly-swatter somewhere in one of the kitchen drawers. I saw it once. My roommate, who drives a Volkswagen and plays football, brought it in the Fall. I guess the sane thing to do now would be to fetch it and run around the apartment with it.

Still, I have never made it my habit to kill insects, and I’m badly outnumbered here.
There are a lot more of them now. Every so often one of them flits past my ear.

I look around me and laugh.

I call Monica’s house again, but there is no answer.

Monica was not my first. One time, I met this forty-year-old divorcee. Her husband had owned about ten Jiffy-Lubes, and maybe three McDonald’s. Unsurprisingly, then, she had some serious bucks from the alimony. I was cutting her grass, I was seventeen, and that time was just like you read about in the smut magazines, when it started.

She offered me lemonade. I shit you not.

She came right on. “Let me show you the house,” she said. “I’ve just redecorated.”

She talked about her ex-husband. She was collecting the astonishing sum of almost four grand a month. Meanwhile, she kept checking me out, and when we got to the bedroom, she put her hands on my shoulders, sat me down on her bed, and started chewing on the crotch of my Levi’s.

Those were some times, but they got boring as hell, I will say. She had a boyfriend anyway.

Monica, of course, was different, in that she was a little closer to my own age.

But she was basically the same, too, as she made clear later. She said that it had been my looks more than my personality that had taken her at the party in Coventry.

It was strange, though, waking up the morning after that. It was like she had a prince lying there in her apartment. She was running around doing the breakfast thing, and talking to me like we knew each other. Even stranger, I felt used to it. I felt like I had taken some heavy narcotic. I knew that I had stumbled into a good thing that would require, for the time being at least, almost no effort on my part. I was game for that.

“I just like you,” she said that morning.

“Well, I like you too,” I said.

She actually laughed at this.

I was often nervous with her, though. I get nervous thinking about it. I could never tell her why.

We were sitting up late once, smoking cigarettes.

“Sometimes, it’s like you don’t really want to do it,” she said.

“Do I?”

She exhaled her smoke, looking straight ahead. She nodded sharply.

“You do.” She twirled her hair with her fingers. It was reddish blond and came down to about her shoulders.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “I don’t want you to think the wrong thing. But I’ve been with guys who could do it all night. They were boring guys. But they could do it. You, on the other hand, can’t get it up sometimes.”

That one always gets back to you. What could I say? But that’s what she was like.

“It’s like you have other things on your mind,” Monica said.

“I do,” I remember saying.

“What?” She turned to me.

“I do. I mean, sometimes I do seem to have other things on my mind.” I drew on my cigarette. “But I don’t. I don’t know. Why do you say that?”

She shrugged and gave me an annoyed look. She settled down and covered her breasts.

“You just like sex more,” I said. “It’s not so unusual.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Then I fucked her. Suddenly she seems just like all the other girls I had known.

Like every one of them in one person. On this basis, I decided to let things turn the way they would.

* * *

I remain in my shorts. The music has stopped.

I am, frankly, astounded at the number of flying ants in my apartment now. I mean, I knew there were ants visiting my kitchen from time to time. (Cats chase rodents in through the broken window in the back bedroom.) I once discovered a salamander behind the toilet. My house is a wildlife preserve. But this is something totally different.

I open the window. It has become darker outside. The clock says five-thirty.

The ants make a weird, fluttering, whispering sound in the air.

There, now, that’s unmistakable. Two of the ants have dropped onto the tabletop where Monica and I were talking before.

I go over to the table.

The ants’ ends are joined. They tumble around for a moment, and it looks like they are fighting.

But then they are still, except for a rhythmic quivering in their fat ends. I stoop to look at this more closely.

The two are oblivious to my huge staring face. The male fascinates me. At least, I think he must be male.

The segments of his abdomen pulse downward towards where he is joined with the other.

I feel as if I must interfere. I want, somehow, to be part of this thing happening on my table. I don’t, though.

Then they are done. They separate. I swipe them onto the floor.

I have a slight hard-on.

Meanwhile, the rest of my ants continue to soar around the room. One of them hits my shoulder, bounces off, flies away.

The window remains open, but I guess most of them have still not taken the hint.

It’s okay. I put on some more music, brush a few ants off the couch, and sit down to watch them. I have turned a few lights on.

* * *

Monica and I did get along, though. This was simple because we shared common goals. To put it plainly, it was to get drunk and have sex. The one took precedence over the other. But neither could get along by itself.

She was the kind of girl who does not keep many other girls as friends. She was one of the guys. She definitely drank more than myself and many of my friends.

On the occasions when we were out – it wasn’t too often – we were usually with them. They were basically losers, and drunken ones, but they amused her. She awed them with her capacity for booze. I awed them because I was getting laid.

We went to bars in Willimantic, Storrs, and sometimes Coventry. A few drinks – bam, bam, bam – and it was time to get along to some bedroom or other.

We were in some kind of love, though, that is a fact.

Once I bought her a flower, a rose. Some fool was hawking them in the Student Union. It was a highly unusual gesture for me, the buying and giving of this thing. She loved it, although she never complained when no others ever came forth. Nor could she remember its existence a few weeks later.

I took the whole thing wryly. To me, it was proof that love can find out a home in the most cynical, unromantic places – namely, our two minds.

One time, I put my hands around her neck and squeezed, to see what she would do.
What she did was just lay there and let her face get all red against the pillow. And look at me. I could tell she was more in love with me at that moment than she had ever been with any other guy in her life. Which she confirmed after I released her and she got her breath back.

Another time. we even saw a movie. We sat in the back of the theater. All we did, through the whole thing, was make fun of the actors, the music, the sets, the direction. We had a good time doing it. We left just before the big climax scene, which put the perfect spin on things, we thought.

I think we were both pretty turned on. It’s one of the nights I remember well.

She was fond of talking about people she knew in the past. One time she told me about her first boyfriend – who, it turned out, she had crossed paths with that day, because he was attending the same school as us.

Every girl has her first-boyfriend story.

“He always made me do it doggy-style,” she told me. “That was his thing.”

It was during the Fall. We were at her place, I remember. We had just turned off Late Night with David Letterman. I could hear the late train making a crossing somewhere, and wasn’t listening much to her.

“How big was he?” I asked. I was curious.

She indicated a span about the length of a cocktail wiener with her fingers.

“Not very,” she said.

I just nodded. I was sure she would say the same thing about me someday.

Christmas break came and went. We hadn’t seen each other since New Year’s, and at the start of the semester we went to this big party together. It was one of those ten-keg bashes that draw about a thousand people. Midway through our visit, she introduced me to some dude with a haircut and one of those artificially worn leather bomber jackets. He looked like a daytime drama star. We shook hands, and then he immediately disappeared.

“That was him,” she said.

“Who?” The tone of her voice made me look at her. She, meanwhile, was giving me the slyest smirk imaginable.

“My first boyfriend. I told you about.”

I had always hated crowds. We were standing in the living room of this place, getting jostled every which way. I could barely hear her.

“Really?”

It occurred to me she thought I believed that bit about the size of the poor dude’s cock.

But when I saw this guy a while later, in line for the bathroom, I just had to keep looking at him and wondering. They told us in sex ed that everybody was pretty much the same, but then you hear about these freaks.

* * *

I think now that the ants are at their thickest.

There are two worlds in my apartment. Theirs is blind, glowing, spinning.

I feel the need to relieve some of the intensity of the event. I put on some pants and move out to the front step.

It is April. The scent from a few mangy lilacs nearby has claimed the air around.
Away, across the lawn of the apartment complex, a bicyclist passes beneath the streetlight.

I inhale strongly, and the night mingles with the stale liquor at the back of my nose and mouth.

I think, with faint amusement, that the scene before me is quite beautiful and singular.

Even in the outdoors I am reminded of the ants. I see them. A few loft up and away from my open window.

Another careens on the sill. It does circles, demented figure eights. It does not look well.

I recall reading in this morning’s paper that it is the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. I try for a moment to find some poetic or symbolic significance in this. There is none, and I laugh.

* * *

Monica’s father died when she was nine. She told me this one night while we were traveling from a bar in Willimantic to her place.

Her father had been an optometrist in private practice. They lived in a great neighborhood. They got MTV when it first came out, and all of that.

One time he got sick. Everyone thought it was a cold, she said, at first. But it got much worse.

Finally, the family convinced him to go see the doctor. He had developed acute pneumonia. Since he refused to be committed to a hospital, he was ordered to stay in bed at home.

One night, she said, he got up and took the car out. It was raining, February.

Nobody remembers him leaving.

Just before dawn, a trooper found the car at the side of the road. He probed the ditch with his flashlight and discovered Monica’s father lying in it.

He was still alive, but he was unconscious. The trooper called for an ambulance.

Twelve hours later, Monica’s father expired in intensive care.

I did not ask why. By this time, we had reached Monica’s place, and I was sure she would let me in on her ideas eventually.

“It was my mother,” she told me later. “She was such a bitch to him. That’s why I finally went to live with my grandmother.”

She turned to me. The lights were off, and I could only see her by the headlights of a car as it approached on the road outside.

“You just don’t give a shit, do you,” she said flatly.

The car passed just as I saw her smile.

She knew the answer, and it delighted her somehow.

But she knew then that things had to turn, too.

* * *

The ants are thinning, and something is happening. I can feel it without even seeing it. The dead ones are all over the floor, along with the dying, who writhe only for a few minutes.

“Time’s up,” I say out loud.

I turn on the light.

The phone rings.

“It’s me,” says Monica.

I say hello. I think.

“What are you doing? Oh yeah? Well listen, I’m not going to see you for a while.”

I swallow. “Okay.”

Monica is silent for a moment.

“Listen, are you alright? What’s going on?” she say.

“Nothing’s going on,” I say.

Monica is silent again.

“So you want me to come over?” she says.

A pause.

“No,” I say. “No. It’s alright.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to, but I will.”

I sigh.

“Monica, you know something?” I say.

I feel her freeze up on the other end, through minute snaps and hisses on the line.

“Yes?”

I breathe heavily. I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I say it:
“There’s a bright white star hanging in the south sky.”

It’s true, there is. I can see it. It’s above the apartment house across the way, in the yellow and green glow of where the sun was before. Sirius is its name. I happen to know. But that isn’t the point here.

She is evidently surprised. She thinks this over.

“Do you see it?” I ask.

But she doesn’t answer, and its because she doesn’t see it. And it’s because she doesn’t know which direction is south. The point is, she doesn’t trust me with this knowledge.

I have nothing more to add, so I hang up.

I turn away from the telephone. A car is pulling up outside.

The phone rings again. I answer.

She swears at me.

Click.

I hear the car’s door slam outside, and sit down in the corner chair. I realize that I’ll probably recognize forever the smug, sure sound of the door closing on a Volkswagen. My roommate is home.

I reach and turn off the light and wait for him. It seems like a very long time before I hear his tread approaching on the concrete walk, his keys clicking near the door, the odd wrenching sound that comes whenever our apartment is unlocked from outside.

He comes in and gropes for the light switch. Then he is standing there, blinking. He doesn’t see me. He starts across the floor, then notices the sound of insects crunching underfoot.

“Hi,” I say.

He jumps.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “What’s going on?”

He is looking around. I am almost as surprised as he.

Everything – our furniture, books, papers, the floor – is covered with a carpet of what must be ten thousand carcasses. About a hundred ants are still flying around the room.

“Wow,” I say. “I had no idea there were so many.”

He is looking at me now, and sees that I am drunk. I shrug.

“Wha… where did they come from?” he asks.

“They just came,” I say.

He turns peevish.

“Why the hell didn’t you do something?”

I shrug again. He makes a heavy sigh of disgust, then hulks into the kitchen. There is a ruinous clatter as various drawers are opened and searched.

I light another cigarette.

He comes back out, wielding the fly-swatter.

“You’re just going to sit there and smoke, then,” he says to me, very quietly.

“If it pleases me.” But then he darts a look at me, so I say, “Relax.”

He doesn’t relax. Instead he gets one on a lamp-shade, then the far wall. He is determined.

“They’re gonna die anyway,” I tell him.

But it’s useless. He has never seen that National Geographic article. He doesn’t know the first thing about it.

I watch him for a while, until he becomes exasperated and flings the instrument back into the kitchen.

“God damn it, how can you just sit there?” he shouts at me.

Then he is gone. He storms back out into the night. Four German cylinders start up and then rev away.

I put off the lights again, and unplug the telephone. That’s it for today. I’m so drunk it feels like the Earth is going to tip over.